The Great Inca Road

The National Museum of the American Indian (part of the Smithsonian) has opened an exhibit, The Greak Inka Road: Engineering an Empire; it will be open until June 2018 (per WSJ, 10-20-2015).

My own interest in great highways is linked with my interest in civilizations; civilizations build road networks as a by-product of administering large areas; and these highways are usually the longest-lasting residues of such cultures; all of us Europeans have trod or driven on what once were Roman roads. A post of mine on South American empires is here. The Incas originated as a culture around 900 A.D. Their empire extended from 1438 to 1533—and would have lasted a great deal longer had it not been for those conquistadors. Most of the Great Inca Road was built during the period of the Inca Empire although parts of it predate Inca dominion.

The map I show is from Wikipedia (link). The system, a roughly parallel formation, has a coastal main highway (in brown) and a mountain route (in blue). The light-brown roads connecting these and branching from them were part of the system—with those crossing the mountains the most spectacular. The broken lines are today’s state borders.

Pondering this vast structure—and looking at many great pictures easily accessible by entering “Inca Road System” into Google Images—I wonder what some counterpart of mine, studying civilizations and their roads, will think of the remains of The Great American Road System two thousand years from now. Will he imagine that they were built by slaves? Such is the reflex belief we bring to the subject—although we know that most Roman roads were built by soldiers and, as best as we can determine, Inca road-building itself was based on something akin to military levies. Such levies are well known to us from medieval times—never mind the still vividly remembered draft….

Ancient South American Cultures

Back in grade school in Bavaria, when studying geography, our teacher asked us to draw maps using colored pencils. In consequence we learned our geography—and for most of us, I think, going by Brigitte’s and my memories, delighted in such homework. Today I engaged in such a task again—having learned how to learn. I didn’t draw the maps but I colored them, all in an effort to sort out the three largest by-gone South American cultures, the Mayans, Incas, and the Aztecs.

But why would I bother? Well, this is a forward-looking venture. We’re approaching an important date, December 21, 2012. On that day, supposedly, according to the long-count Mayan calendar, a Great Age will come to an end. That projection, in its turn, has induced scores of people to predict a Great Change on that day, call it Doomsday, End Times, Apocalypse, what have you—possibly the collision with an alien celestial body! And I plan to make a posting on that day here on Ghulf Genes—provided, of course, that Doomsday is delayed. But to say anything meaningful about that event, I thought it wise, minimally, to know where the Mayans actually lived—and, surprise, I didn’t have the foggiest. Unless you are yourself extraordinarily learned, with fantastic memory, you’ll know the feeling: faint images of pyramids, strange stonework, very high mountains. But was that the Mayans? The Aztecs? The Incas? Let’s sort it out. I’ll do that today in terms of space and time.

Above you see an image of Middle and South America, the virtue of which lies in suggesting that Mexico is shaped like a whale; to the right of that I’ve colored in, if only approximately, the regions where the Aztecs, Mayans, and the Incas once flourished. Now I had the Mayan’s location, in the whale’s right flipper, where, going roughly clock-wise from 9:00 o'clock, we find today the cities of Campeche, Merida (the largest, 11:00), Cancun (2:00), and Chetuma (4:30). Not a region of great extent. The Aztecs dominated a region to the east and north. And the Incas had the West Coast of today’s South American continent all to themselves.

Now let us fix the time dimension:

• Mayans. They came first; scholars put their beginnings into very ancient times, 2000 BC. We are, of course, not talking about civilizations yet—unless the Mayans had more than one. The classical period of the one we know, thus analogous to the Greek classical period, extended from 250 to 900 AD. Thereafter the Mayan culture entered its “post-modern period,” meaning that its coherence, cultural and political unity shattered.
• Incas. They came next. They are dated from roughly 900 AD, but their expansion, and therefore the Inca empire, is dated to 1438; it ended in 1533 by conquest from Europe. The empire spread to the Atlantic from Cuzco (the current Cusco in Peru, thus roughly halfway in the illustration), spreading north, south, and west. This civilization had a very sophisticated numerical record-keeping system, using knotted string, but no writing.
• The Aztecs. They were last to get going. Their beginnings are put around 1300 AD; their period of empire, centered on Tenochtitlán, today’s Mexico City, began in 1427 and lasted until 1519. They too succumbed to the conquistadores.

Enough for a start. But there will be other posts as, driven by the clock, we approach the End. But the impatient among you might wish to look at this quite superb and short slide-show (link), produced by Angie Matheny. It has multiple virtues, among them a comprehensive summary, vivid images, and some information that might come as a surprise.